Business

The big beasts brawl

There’s an interesting piece in the Canberra Times on divisions between Public Service Commissioner, Lynelle Briggs, and the secretary of the Department of Finance, Ian Watt.

At issue is whether or not smaller agencies can be slapped with the same efficiency dividend (funny old way to describe a budget cut isn’t it) as larger departments without detrimental effects on doing the jobs they were set up to accomplish in the first place.

Dr. Watt reckons that if the agencies were really hurting their shiny new Ministers would be on top of it.

What’s Your opinion?

Lynelle Briggs is the only one who has complained cos she is the only one who understands how these things work.

The bulk of the smaller agencies are run by fairly low level people (non-SES, or lowest level SES), who often come from outside the public service, and often from overseask, with expertise in Film, or in Science etc – not lobbying ministers. They have probably never met their minister, and have no idea that they could turn up and demand more money.

I’m really talking about the cultural institutions here, which are far smaller than CSIRO, and have under 100 employees. Taking a 3.5% cut from them really bites, and jobs are lost and the remaining staff are stressed out of their brains trying to keep the places going. And their budgets are pretty minimal anyway – how much is really being saved here. They may as well just shut the places down – 3.5% budget cuts for a couple of years will result in the places having to close down anyway.

Ian Watt needs to pop out of his ivory tower and check out the state of some of the agencies.